President Donald Trump’s plan to accept from Qatar a luxury 747 jumbo jet worth $400 million to use as Air Force One—and then transfer it to his presidential library foundation upon leaving office—has finally inspired Democrats to act like the opposition party. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer put a hold on all Department of Justice nominees, and other top senators want to vote to censure the plan. Of all the violations Trump has already committed in his first term in office, from deporting legal residents to eliminating government agencies without Congress’s approval, why is this the one Democrats have drawn a line in the sand on?
While the gift is unprecedented in size and scale, Trump’s behavior is nothing new. During his first term he was accused of flouting the Constitution and a slew of ethics laws, including in a lawsuit alleging that he violated the emoluments clause, which prohibits presidents from taking gifts from foreign governments, through his hotels and other businesses. His first impeachment, over withholding military aid to Ukraine in exchange for their help in the 2020 election, was in a similar vein, and he was convicted in New York of falsifying business documents to try to win in 2016.
So voters already knew about Trump’s corruption—yet they reelected him anyway. Either voters forgot about his past transgressions when they cast a ballot last November, they didn’t care about them, or they cared about other issues more. And it’s not clear that voters feel any differently about Trump’s corruption this time around, or will continue caring long enough to lead to Democratic victories in the midterms. But there is a way for the opposition party to leverage the president’s malfeasance come next year.
Voters haven’t seen Trump as particularly honest in a long time, and before the election, voters saw Trump’s long history of well-documented lies as a concern. Those views have, unsurprisingly, continued into his second term. In a January YouGov poll, 45 percent said “dishonest” applied “a lot” to Trump and another 19 percent said “a little”; those percentages were nearly identical—one point less—when they were asked whether he was “corrupt.”
But here’s the thing: Americans think our entire political system is corrupt, especially when it comes to money in politics and campaigns. In general, Americans think money has too much influence on political campaigns and in politics, with 80 percent saying big donors have too much influence on the decisions Congress makes, according to the Pew Research Center. More broadly, New York Times/Siena College polling from 2022 found that more Americans thought “government corruption” posed a threat to democracy than thought Trump did, and that generally the government no longer works for the people and primarily benefits elites.
Voters often think that political shadiness and bribes happen in the shadows, so the fact that Trump is brazenly unethical and openly brags about “deals” like Qatar’s plane gift might make it seem less bad. “If you’ve already written off the entire political system as fundamentally corrupt, then individual scandals don’t change the equation much,” said Sarah Kreps, a professor at Cornell University. “They might roll their eyes at some of his antics, but they see him as playing the same rough game his opponents are, just doing it more commendably because he doesn’t even have the pretense.”
With help from Republicans, Trump has also redefined “corruption” for his voters to be specific to Democrats. A YouGov survey from January found that nearly 80 percent of Republicans and Democrats thought presidential corruption was a problem for the other party’s president, and Republicans were more likely to view journalists and media executives as corrupt. That argument especially worked against President Joe Biden, who had been in public office for most of his adult life, a D.C. figure and an intrinsic part of an already corrupt system in some voters’ eyes. In a YouGov/Yahoo poll in September 2023, almost as many voters overall said Biden and his family were corrupt as thought the same of Trump and his family. So Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine and laptop were “scandals,” while whatever Trump does is not. Partisanship thus defines corruption, rather than evidence.
Corruption rarely factors as a top concern for voters, although perhaps that’s because pollsters never ask voters to rank corruption among their top concerns. But the issues that rose to the top for most voters in 2024 were the economy and inflation. When asked open-ended questions about what determined their votes in 2024, most Trump voters said “economy” and “immigration,” while Harris voters were motivated to vote for her because of “Trump” and concerns for “democracy.”
Other issues simply matter more to voters than corruption. Stanley Feldman, a political science professor at Stony Brook University, said Trump voters fall into two camps: the MAGA faithful and swing voters who chose Trump because he promised to fix the economy. The latter group “were unhappy with inflation, thought that the Democratic Party had, if not brought on inflation, … not done enough to deal with [it] because it was focused on problems about minority groups and transgender rights when [it] should have been focused on cost of living and economic issues,” he said.
None of that is to say that Democrats shouldn’t make noise about Trump’s corruption or fight it, but whether this becomes a salient issue for voters will depend on a number of factors. In 2020, voters punished Trump for his actions during his first term, but they forgave him four years later, which shows that threats to democratic norms and institutions can move the needle with voters but not supersede more immediate, kitchen-table concerns. Whether voters ultimately punish Republicans for Trump’s corruption may depend primarily on how Americans are doing economically next year. If they’re doing poorly, then Democrats would be wise to weave Trump’s corruption into a broader story about his failure to address voters’ economic concerns.